American electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla has submitted an application to become an electricity generator in Great Britain, documents from energy regulator Ofgem has shown. This is “for the purpose of giving a supply to any premises or enabling a supply so given” to areas specified to be “Great Britain, the territorial sea adjacent to Great Britain or in a Renewable Energy Zone,” Autocar has reported.
The application was signed off by energy products sales director at Tesla, Evan Rice, and the report points to suggestions that the EV maker could be involved in a large-scale battery manufacturing project such as the one it built in Australia in 2016, according to the magazine.
Other possibilities are that Tesla is heading into the energy aggregation market, said Autocar. The American firm currently has an Autobidder platform which enables automated energy trading, which generates revenue from distribution of batteries and real-time trading.
Other automakers which have delved into energy generation and storage include Volkswagen, which is developing a vehicle-to-grid system that aims to stabilise the energy grid in times of excess supply by selling electricity back to the grid when supply from wind and solar power are reduced.
This will bring Volkswagen 350 GWh worth of energy storage at its disposal through its EV fleet by 2025, and this will grow to 1 terawatt-hour by 2030, said the German automaker’s chief strategist Michael Jost. Elsewhere, German utility firm E.ON is also working with Nissan with the second-generation Leaf on vehicle-to-grid electricity services.
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